Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

How does Stevenson intrigue the reader?

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote ‘The strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ in 1885. The Novella was a great success upon its publication in January 1887. The novella sold forty thousand copies in six months, even the Prime Minister at the time and Queen Victoria read it.

‘The strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ tapped into the anxieties of Stevenson’s age, the Victorian era. By the end of the nineteenth centaury many people began to question the ideals that had defined that era. With the notion of a single body containing both Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the novella imagines an inextricable link between civilisation and savagery, good and evil. Jekyll’s attraction to the freedom from restraint that Hyde enjoys mirrors Victorian England’s secret attraction to the allegedly savage non-western cultures.

An important theme in ‘The strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ is that you can never trust appearances, for example, Jekyll’s backdoor entrance looks very ugly and rundown but the inside is ‘furnished with luxury and good taste’. Another example is Jekyll himself. Jekyll, a respectable middle class doctor, and Hyde, the evil alter-ego murderer that has no restraint. They are the same person, no one would suspect Jekyll of brutally murdering the respected politician Sir Danvers Carew.

The duality of human nature is also employed in Stevenson’s Novella. Dr Jekyll is ‘good’ and Mr Hyde is ‘evil’. Perhaps Stevenson meant to imply that ‘evil’ is a part of all of us.

The places presented in ‘The strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ can be seen as symbols of the divided nineteenth centaury society, which the rich lived very different lives to the poor, sometimes in parts of the city which were geographically quite close. In a similar way Jekyll and Hyde represent the two very different sides of human beings, contained within the same person. Mr Hyde resides in Soho, which was a pocket of poverty and criminality in...